Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctica Expedition to be the first man to cross on foot the entire continent of Antarctica. Just coming short of the expedition's landing destination, the Endurance became moored on a sea of ice for ten months only to be crushed under the pressure of heavy ice floes. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing is the inconceivable but true survival story of Shackleton and his 27 man crew and the hardships that they endured.  After being forced to abandon ship, the party had no choice but to set up camp on an ice floe and aimlessly drift for half a year. The further northwest the ice floe went, the more dire the situation became as the ice began to weaken and break apart. The crew had to eventually abandon camp and make an attempt for land utilizing three small lifeboats--the James Caird (pictured above), Dudley Docker, and Stancomb Wills. What followed was days of sleeplessness, gale force winds, freezing cold temperatures, waves crashing over the boats, men soaked to the gills, frostbite, constant rowing and ceaseless back-breaking work just to keep the boats afloat. They ended up on the inhospitable Elephant Island where the crew would remain while Shackleton and a small team embarked on the James Caird.  There goal was South Georgia where a small whaling station existed, an incredulous 650 nautical miles away. Shackleton succeeded on reaching deliverance but only after weeks of hardship, and a 10,000 mile high snow covered mountain climbing finale.

A common theme throughout the book was the tediousness of time. These men sat around day after day pondering their own fates with little to none entertainment that may have otherwise distracted them. 

The remainder of that night was an eternity, composed of seconds individually endured until they merged into minutes and minutes finally grew into hours. And through it all there was the voice of the wind, shrieking as they had never heard it shriek before in all their lives.

Day after day after day dragged by in a gray, monotonous haze. The temperatures were high and the winds were light. Most of the men would have liked to sleep the time away, but there was a limit to the number of hours a man could spend inside his sleeping bag. Every available time-killing pastime was exploited to the fullest and often much beyond. On February 6, James wrote: "Hurley & Boss play religiously a set of six games of poker patience every afternoon. I think each rather regards it a duty but it certainly passes away an hour. The worst thing is having to kill time. It seems such a waste, yet there is nothing else to do." Each day became so much like the one before that any unusual occurrence, however small, generated enormous interest.

Instead, life was reckoned in periods of a few hours, or possibly only a few minutes--an endless succession of trials leading to deliverance from the particular hell of the moment. When a man was awakened to go on watch, the focal point of his existence became that time, four hours away, when he could slither back into the cold, wet rockiness of the sleeping bag he was now leaving. And within each watch there were a number of subdivisions: the time at the helm--eighty eonic minutes, during which a man was forced to expose himself to the full wickedness of the spray and the cold; the ordeal of of pumping, and the awful task of shifting ballast; and the lesser trials which lasted perhaps two minutes--like the interval after each numbing spray struck until a man's clothes warmed enough so that he could move once more.

Another interesting theme was the adaptability of the men and their positive attitudes.  Some of these men were relentless optimists even in the face of such doom.

The sight that the Caird presented was one of the most incongruous imaginable. Here was a patched and battered 22-foot boat, daring to sail alone across the world's most tempestuous sea, her rigging festooned with a threadbare collection of clothing and half-rotten sleeping bags. Her crew consisted of six men whose faces were black with caked soot and half-hidden by matted beards, whose bodies were dead white from constant soaking in salt water. In addition, their faces, and particularly their fingers were marked with ugly round patches of missing skin where frostbites had eaten into their flesh. Their legs from the knees down were chafed and raw from the countless punishing trips crawling across the rocks in the bottom. And all of them were afflicted with salt water boils on their wrists, ankles, and buttocks. But had someone unexpectedly come upon this bizarre scene, undoubtedly the most striking thing would have been the attitude of the men...relaxed, even faintly jovial--almost as if they were on an outing of some sort.

The rapidity with which one can completely change one's ideas...and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful.

The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances.

Other notable passages:

But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

He spied the vapor rising from the freshly killed seals, stumbled toward where they lay, and thrust his frozen hands into their blood-warm bowels.

It was more than just a sunrise. It seemed to flood into their souls, rekindling the life within them. They watched the growing light quenching the wild, dark misery of the night that now, at last, was over.

In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night.